Is there a road map to becoming an antiracist? According to Ibram X Kendi, the bestselling author of the newly released book How to be an Antiracist, it’s not as simple as describing yourself as “not racist”.

Who was your target audience for this book?

IK: The target audience is really people who are willing to open themselves up to changing themselves and society, or people who are already doing that. That group includes people of different races, genders, and ideologies. I really want to speak to open-minded people, not closed-minded people.

What’s the difference between an antiracist and someone who is simply not racist?

We can distinguish between a racist and an antiracist by how they respond when charged with saying or doing something that is racist. No matter what they say or do when charged with being racist, a racist says, ‘I’m not racist.’ But what an antiracist does when charged with being racist is accept that idea or action as the definition of a racist idea and the definition of a racist: ‘Did I say something was wrong with black people? Yes, I did. So yes, I was being a racist in that moment. I recognize and admit that now. And I’m going to be different.”’ While a racist, no matter what, they’re going to keep saying, ‘I’m not racist.’ And the most extreme racists say: “I’m the least racist person anywhere in the world.”

What role do you think that white allies need to play in antiracism?

I’m not necessarily requesting white people to be allies, as much as I’m getting them to see that they should be part of this struggle for their own self-interest. So, a policy that eliminates the disparities in health insurance by providing health insurance for all is a policy that is antiracist because it eliminates racial disparity, but it clearly helps white people too. I think that it’s incredibly important for people to see why many of the inequities that we have in society – whether gendered, class, or other means – are actually being reinforced by racism.

In your book you say you’ve been complicit to racism in the past. Do we need to talk more about racism within the black community?

I think within black spaces, there has been a lot of conversation around these issues. I think outside of black spaces, there has not necessarily been as much conversation. I think that the terms that have been utilized within black spaces, or even outside of black spaces, have not necessarily been the terms that I was using in How to be an Antiracist. So for instance, black people have historically called certain other black people sell outs. They’ve called them Oreos. We called it many different terms. We’ve also talked about internalized racism. But we haven’t taken the next step, generally speaking, where [we discuss how] that black person who thought that black people are lazy, and went after black people as opposed to racism, is being racist too.

What made you share your own complicity with racism?

I think the heartbeat of antiracism is confession – the ability to self-reflect, to admit one’s own racist upbringing, to take an accounting of ourselves and the racist ideas that we’ve believed over the course of our lifetime, to think deeply about the policies and policymakers who are racist that we support. This accounting is essential for us to change. How to be an Antiracist is largely a confessional accounting of myself, which was necessary for me to begin and continue the process of striving to be an answer.

How is the fight between racism and sexism linked?

First and foremost, black women are a racial group. People introduce racist ideas to demean black women. In terms of those ideas, there’s been specific policies that are intersecting in terms of racist and sexist policies that have targeted and harmed black women. The same thing with black men, in terms of them being a racial group that have been affected by racist ideas and policies. If I as a black male reject the racist ideas about black men and accept the racist ideas about black women, then whenever I’m accepting those ideas or stating that black women are not believable or can’t be raped, I’m actually expressing one of the oldest racist ideas, which is that of the unrapeable black woman. And I need to take an accounting and recognize that, as I certainly did in this book.

Your book talks about celebrities who fall short when it comes to race. Chris Rock was one example. What do you think about his work?

I think to be antiracist is to recognize our personal complexities in the sense of what we’re fighting. We’re fighting internally to be antiracist. So, in terms of assessing other people, we should allow for people to essentially make racist mistakes. When it came to Chris Rock, eventually he stopped doing the skit that distinguished between black people and n—s, which I would argue is the skit that allows black people to imagine themselves as superior to other black people who are labeled the n-word. I think he grew. Eventually he stopped doing that skit. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that he became an antiracist. In critiquing anyone else’s ideas, they became a backseat to me critiquing my own about black people.

In your interview with the New York Times, you talked about how your cancer diagnosis forced you to reflect on your mortality, which has a universal resonance in today’s era of Black Lives Matter. You also coined the phrase ‘metastatic racism’. What does black survival mean for you now?

I think that before that diagnosis, and before even my wife’s diagnosis, I had not necessarily connected racism to cancer. I actually thought that this was not an appropriate analogy. But I think after taking care of someone, fighting cancer myself, and simultaneously studying racism, the similarity became quite apparent to me. It became apparent to me that in order to survive cancer, we have to believe that we can survive cancer. Similarly, in order to survive racism, we have to believe we can survive racism. Because when any group of people stop believing that they can survive metastatic racism, it’s going to be very difficult to wage the fight against racism and to endure the pain that typically comes during that fight. So it caused me to become more committed through the challenging moments of fighting racism. It’s going to be challenging, just like it’s extremely challenging to fight metastatic cancer.